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Mark Carney: Why I Believe Canada’s Future Lies with Europe

The prime minister calls for a sweeping new alliance as the old global order comes apart

What follows is the text of Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s address to the European Parliament on Thursday, September 17, 2026.

Today, I will speak to you about how our response to the current geopolitical rupture must include a new dimension. But first of all, I’d like to refer to something older. Something that considerably predates European Union–Canada relations. Because the depth of our bonds cannot be measured by trade, nor what is written in treaties. Our bonds are deeply rooted in our lands.

In the heart of Germany, above Weimar, there is a wooded ridge called Ettersberg. For decades, Goethe walked, thought, and wrote there. An oak on that ridge came to bear his name, a living monument to the highest ideals of European culture. As the twentieth century turned dark, that same oak became trapped behind the barbed wire of Buchenwald, a silent witness to humanity’s deepest moral failure. Goethe understood that ideals must be fought for, that values do not defend themselves. Indeed, at the end of Faust, the old man’s last vision is of a free people on free ground.

Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben, der täglich sie erobern muß.

“Freedom and life must be earned every single day.” Every day. Not once in 1945, or 1956, or 1989. Every day, including this one.

Freedom was gained thanks to the heroism of the European wartime resistance. It was nurtured by the founders of the European Coal and Steel Community in the aftermath of the war. It was fostered by the creation of the European Community. It was preserved by the establishment of the European Union. And it was developed through its expansion following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The values embodied by that Goethe oak have also endured, in part, because the ideals that flourished beneath its branches crossed the Atlantic.

In 1917, amidst the devastation of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, a young Canadian lieutenant named Leslie Miller gathered a handful of acorns from the shattered European landscape. He carried them home and planted them in Canadian soil in Milliken, Ontario, where they grew into a majestic forest.

A century later, a profound circle of renewal was completed. Grafts from Leslie Miller’s Canadian oaks were repatriated to France and replanted on the same Vimy ridge where they had been born. This is the essence of the Canada–European Union partnership. Seeds, values, ideas, trade, people, and progress carried back and forth across the Atlantic for centuries.

We are not fair-weather allies. We do not pursue zero-sum deals. Our commitment to the rule of law and our unyielding defence of human dignity, individual freedom, and democracy share the same deep roots, the same unwavering dedication.

We hold common values, for which we have always fought and in whose defence we must always remain vigilant. We believe that a strong economy is not an end in itself but the means to a just society. We are committed stewards of our natural heritage. We believe that our prosperity grows when it is shared. This is a sharing of choice, not coincidence.

In his writings, Goethe borrowed a word from the chemists of his day: Wahlverwandtschaften. The elective affinity of different elements that combine because of their inherent attraction.

Canada and Europe are not bound by geography, even though our Danish friends know that we share a 3,000-kilometre border in the Arctic. We are bound by an affinity—elective, chosen, renewed, and stronger for being so.

Today, our societies are being battered by new storms: the disruption caused by climate change, the........

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